The Great Powdered Milk Taste Test and Review

Ever wanted to find a powdered milk that tastes good? You’re not alone. So just in case you don’t want to go through the expense and hassle of trying out every kind of powdered milk you can find, read on. I did it for you.

After a comment about the flavor of powdered milk on another post, I hatched a plan to have folks try a bunch of different kinds of powdered milks to maybe find one that tasted good so this reader and anyone else who wants to know (including me) will know which brands would be best to buy because you know powdered milk is not cheap. I had some super help with this milk experiment from Emergency Essentials, Grandma’s Country Foods, Walton Feed, Blue Chip Group (now Augason Farms), and Honeyville Grain who all donated some of their milk for the review. Thank you to all of you–we couldn’t have done it without you!

So here’s the basic setup. I gave each milk a letter A through J. Yes, we tried 10 kinds of milk. 2 powdered milk alternatives, 2 regular non-instant powdered milks, 5 instant powdered milks, and regular old skim milk in a jug thrown in just for fun and science (but nobody knew which one it was). There were also two kinds of chocolate milks which I labeled R and S. A friend and I mixed up each kind of powdered milk and let it chill. Then we had people taste them and grade each on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being really bad and 5 being really good and let them write any comments they wanted to about any of them. This happened over two days. Then I totaled up the scores, divided by the number of tasters, and did some other fancy math statistics tricks I learned from my third grader and came up with the results. We’ll start with Milk F–the real milk, then we’ll go in order from A to J which were all the regular milks. I’ll give the review results on the chocolate milks in another post.

Each can had approximately 11 1/2 cups of powder in it. Some a little more, some a little less. I didn’t measure every can.

Milk “F” was Great Value brand fat free milk from Wal-Mart. This is the standard. If we want something to taste “like milk” this is what it should taste like. No, I don’t think fat free/skim milk tastes like milk any more than you do, but because all of the powdered milks are non-fat, we are using non-fat milk to compare them to. It’s average taste score was 3.46, with scores ranging from 2-5 and the score chosen most often split equally between 3 and 4. Okay, for all you parents of grade schoolers, that is “mean=3.46, range=2-5, mode=3, 4”. Got it? Ingredients: milk, vitamins A and D.

Honeyville’s milk alternative is not 100% milk. It has a whole slew of ingredients including sweet dairy whey, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, corn syrup solids, and vitamins A and D3. The instructions say to mix it into warm water. We used the same mixing pitcher to mix each kind of milk, of course washing it in between. This one mixed up fairly easily. It took 2 cups of powder to make a gallon of drink. It was kind of thin, you might put more than that in. This one didn’t score too well on the taste. It average score was 2.09 with a range of 1-4 and the most common choice being 1. This milk settled/separated over time after being mixed, so you’d want to keep it in a container that you could easily mix it before pouring.

Milk “B”: Morning Moos Milk Alternative. Available from and donated by Blue Chip Group (now Augason Farms). Also available at some Utah Wal-Marts and Associated Foods Stores. $11.89/can. $2.07/gallon

Morning Moos is the second in our milk alternative group. This is not 100% milk. Its ingredients include sweet whey, creamer (including corn syrup solids), coconut oil, sugar, nonfat milk, vitamins A and D. The can claims great results when using it for cooking due to the high percentage of whey. I’m not sure I’d use a milk alternative to substitute for milk in a recipe. I think I’ll stick with real powdered milk. However, this milk alternative had the highest score among all the milks sampled for taste. So maybe some for drinking or putting on cereal would be good to have around. It mixed easily into warm water. It also took 2 cups of powder to make a gallon of drink. Morning Moos average taste score was 4 with a range of 2-5 and the most common choice was 4. I’m kind of partial to real milk, but if I was storing just for drinking and wanting it to taste good, I might get me some cans of Morning Moos.

Milk “C”: Western Family (Store Brand) Powdered Milk. This particular brand is available at Associated Foods stores. I’m guessing it is a comparable taste to other store brands. I really didn’t want to test all the store brands I could find, so this is it.

This is an instant powdered milk and mixed up the easiest of all. It dissolved readily in warm or cold water. It also didn’t taste very good. It was the classic powdered milk taste. Ick. It is 100% milk–ingredients: nonfat dry milk, vitamin A palmitate, vitamin D3. It took 5 1/3 cups to make a gallon. Wow. That’s a lot of powder to get a gallon of milk. Seriously, I had no idea there was as much variance as there is in the amount of powder required to mix a gallon of milk. The other drawback with this kind of powdered milk is that it is packaged in a box–not good for long term storage. Average taste score was 2.15, with scores ranging from 1-4 and the most common taste score was 2. My favorite comment on this one: “Bitter, tastes like old milk.” There you have it. So if store brand boxed powdered milk is what you usually buy, I have good news for you–There ARE better tasting powdered milks out there.

For starters, this stuff was a big pain to mix. We tried mixing it into warm water and it clumped pretty severely, so then we tried mixing it into cold water which made it worse. We ended up throwing the whole cold water pitcher out and starting again with warm water. Holy hassle, Batman. This stuff repelled water. We joked as we were fighting with it that it would probably be the best tasting just because it was such a pain to mix. It actually did turn out to have pretty good flavor. Its average taste score was 3.29 which was almost as good as real milk. It is 100% milk–ingredients: 100% real instant nonfat dry milk. It doesn’t appear to have vitamins added. It took 5 1/3 cups to make a gallon, so you don’t get very many gallons out of a can. Probably 2-3 gallons. So even though the cost of the can isn’t as high as some of the others in the experiment, your cost per gallon is pretty steep. Taste scores ranged from 2-5 on this and the most common score was 3.

Milk “E” Country Cream Instant Non-Fat Milk. Available from and donated by Grandma’s Country Foods. Also available at Utah Macey’s stores and some Associated Foods stores. $12.99/can. $3.39/gallon.

This milk mixed up easily in warm or cold water. We used warm for the experiment (after the trouble mixing milk D, we just mixed everything else into warm water), but I have mixed this into cold and not had a problem. This was a pretty good tasting powdered milk. I liked it, but one farm lady thought it tasted like calf milk. It’s average taste score was 2.77, but the most common score chosen was 4. The few that didn’t like it, really didn’t like it, so that brought the average down. Scores ranged from 1-4. It took 3 cups to make a gallon, so a better mix ratio than some of the others. Ingredients: 100% real instant nonfat milk, vitamins A & D. I’d buy this milk. Especially when it goes on sale at Macey’s (too bad there’s not a Macey’s near me–that is one place I miss since we left living in the civilized world). You might get a can and test it out before buying a case of it just in case you’re one that doesn’t like it.

Milk “F” was the regular milk in a jug we discussed at the top of the post, so on to milk “G”.

The ingredients on this one were nonfat dry milk, lactose, vitamin A palmitate and vitamin D3. The instructions say you can mix into cold water. We used warm again and it mixed easily. This milk had more “flavor” than some of the others. A common comment was “sweet”. For some uses, like baking, I don’t mind my powdered milk having “flavor”, but for straight drinking, I don’t like it so much. It took 5 1/3 cups of powder to make a gallon of milk, so this was on the high end of the mix ratio. Maybe if you mixed less in it wouldn’t have as much flavor. The average taste score on the Rainy Day instant milk was 2.81, with a range of 1-4 and the most common score chosen was 3.

There is one more instant powdered milk, but it got out of order in the lineup, so the next two milks are Non-Instant or Regular Powdered Milks.

Non instant milks just don’t have great “milk” taste, and this one was no exception. They do, however, generally cost less per can and usually are more concentrated than instant milks so they use less powder to make the same amount of liquid milk. That all equates to more milk for your money. When you’re baking or making canned milk substitutes or cheeses, it won’t matter how great your powdered milk tastes as a liquid–you’re not pouring it over your cereal. I’m all for stocking less expensive non-instant powdered milks for everything but drinking straight. We mixed this as the directions stated–mix the powdered milk into a small amount of warm water, then add the rest of the water either warm or cold. Maybe that’s what we needed to do on milk D. It worked great. Ingredients: Non-fat milk powder. The milk was not tasty with an average score of 2.0, scores ranging from 1-4 and a most common score of 1. One commenter simply said, “Bad!” Now before you go thinking how low those scores are, of the two non-instant milks we tried, this was the better one. It took only 2 cups of powder to make a gallon, so it’s really good on the mix ratio also.

Okay, this is the least expensive powdered milk right now, and the one I have the most of and use regularly in baking and cooking. It was also solidly scored the worst tasting of all the milks we tried. No, I did not use the 12 year old stuff from my food room, I opened fresh stuff canned a month before the experiment. I had some folks about cry when they found out how bad it tasted because that was the only kind they had stored. But like I said before, I don’t care how it tastes as liquid milk when I’m making cheese or baking with it. I actually like the added flavor in my breads. So don’t despair, all that powdered milk you have from the cannery does not need to be replaced with something else. Maybe just supplemented with another brand to be used for drinking. The commenter who called that last milk “Bad!” called this one “Worse!”. Its average taste score was 1.75 with scores ranging from 1-4 and the most common score chosen was 1. It took 3 cups to make a gallon, so actually it makes the Rainy Day brand comparable in price for the amount of milk you can make from the can. Ingredients: nonfat dry milk, vitamin A palmitate, vitamin D3.

This milk arrived in the mail in time for the second day of testing, so some of the people didn’t get to try it, but quite a few still did. It scored best of all the instant powdered real milks with an average score of 3.5 (actually slightly higher than regular skim milk), scores ranging from 2-4 and its most common score was 4. It mixed easily in warm water and took 2 2/3 cups to make a gallon of milk. It has a low mix ratio, but is also the most expensive can of milk we tried, so wait for a sale here if you can. I’d definitely pick some of this up for drinking.

Wow, are you still reading? Amazing. We made it through all the regular white milks we tried. I’ll cover the chocolate varieties in the next post, so now for you visual people, here’s the information in a table.

This is a great post. I've got a bunch of Morning Moo milk that I've never tasted – good to know it will do the job when I get around to opening a can. One request – could you post the cost per gallon for each of the products? Or maybe indicate how many gallons can be made from each can of product so I can figure out the cost myself? Thanks!

Cecily-It's a good thing I secretly like math! I got approximately 11 1/2 cups of powder out of a can. I've added the cost per gallon to each milk's explanation. If I'm real tricky I might get it into the tables at the bottom at some point. Thanks for the suggestion!

Mariah-Ha! I don't know which kind she used. Well, mom? I know you'll be reading this. What kind of powdered milk did you torture your daughter with? ;)

I've been using Provident Pantry milk for about 5 years. Two adults in household, use 1/2 & 1/2 for coffee so never buy real milk.

I use it in my oatmeal in the AM and for any recipe calling for milk – add it to dry ingredients and add the necessary amount of water with the wet ingredients. Also makes delicious mashed potatoes – sprinkle it on the potatoes, beat them till almost ready, then add potato water to desired consistency.

Yipes, my daughters!!You really expect me to remember what I used 15+ yrs ago??? Recalling the state of my pocketbook, it was probably the icky store brand–oh, there was a short time that I used whey powder type milk substitute cuz I got it cheap. That may have been what scarred your childhood, Mariah. The few years we had goats/goats milk apparently scarred the rest of you…:)

Great review! I am wondering if there is something wrong with me, since I think the LDS stuff tastes fine. Now I need to try some of the others since they reportedly taste so much better. You have aroused my curiosity!

You can’t just mix it in cold water. I used to mix it in the blender, then let it sit overnight & add more water as the bubbles would go away. I also added a couple drops vanilla. Had 5 kids & buying that much store-bought milk would have cost too much. I also bought 50# bags of NF dry milk (Carnation) straight from the dairy. They don’t sell to the public anymore, but my daughter told them her mom used to buy there so they sell to her.

There are some brands that say they can be mixed in cold water. I know the Thrive instant milk mixes readily with cold water. Others just turn into a giant clump of gooey powder mess if you try to mix them in cold water.

Thank You, I think you did a great job. I use powdered milk for cooking and when we're done with all our free backs of it I was going to purchase some from Emergency Essentials and now I know that it'll taste good. Thanks.

Yeah the milk in my food storage is "Provident Pantry Instant Non-Fat Dry Milk." We drank it during our 2 week mock emergency week and couldn't tell the difference between real milk and this powdered milk. I always have a quart in my fridge that we use for baking purposes to rotate it. I highly recommend it and always purchase it when it is on sale. I even have the pitcher they sale with it – which mixes it very smoothly and pain free.

It was a great article …. plus I was surprised to see that you are Utah Prepper author too (which I follow). Wow!

I love the taste of the morning moo and am looking forward to hearing how you rate the chocolate variety. I use it every morning when I take my vitamins and it makes them go down smoothly! I wish I had a source here in AZ and didn't have to order it from Utah and Pay the high shipping!! Thanks for all your hard work!! it is truly appreciated!

Angela, great experiment. I actually use the Morning Moo's to bake my bread with and it makes a very good, chewy, golden brown crust. Better than any other milk I have tried. My kids love it as well. Have you tried their Chocolate version, it is our new hot chocolate.Jared

Angela–Great experiment! I was just wondering how many total people sampled the milk? Maybe I missed it someplace in your article. We've always liked the Country Cream (although I admit I haven't tried most of the types you tested), and yes, Macey's has great deals on it from time to time.

Just curious, but what was Wade's choice? as I recall from our fieldwork days, he can be rather picky about some things…

Texasmufflerman- the LDS cannery milk is non instant or regular powdered milk. It is processed differently than instant powdered milks and doesn't mix up as easily. Although, that milk D that was supposedly instant didn't mix up easily either.

Anon-vanilla is great. Any type of flavoring added to the milk would help out if it didn't taste too good to you right out of the can. I like a little molasses in my milk. Yum. But I don't know that I'd pour my molasses milk over my cereal . . .

Andrew-I do not know of any powdered soy milks, but haven't looked for any either so they might exist, I just don't know of any.

April-Wade didn't like any of them. Imagine that. He mixed the leftovers from the better ones half and half with real 2% milk and then he'd drink it. Picky is an understatement ;)

We had 30 people try the milks over two days. Some didn't even try them all based on the reactions of the people in front of them in line, so I used the actual number of scores for each individual milk to figure the average. I know it's not a huge sample, but we live in a little town. :)

Thank you so much for this! I had to laugh at some of the comments of your testers. We have been using our powdered milk for a few months of and on. With our Morning Moos my kids said, "Mom your homemade milk is better than the other kind." I wondered if it was just because they were being nice. =)We just finished up a can of the LDS Cannery milk. The first gallon I made, my husband said it was too watery. So, I added 1/2 cup extra, and it tasted better. I have to admit, Morning Moo's tastes better. AND, regular milk is better that either of them. But, in a pinch, it hasn't bothered my family much to use powdered! Thanks again for your post.

Just a note from a former dairy farm worker. The taste of fresh milk is best judged from a cardboard container, not the plastic, as the fluorescent light in stores has an oxidizing effect which affects the flavor. It also experiences nutrient losses including the degradation of riboflavin and vitamins A and D. See http://www.safespectrum.com/applications_dairy.html

I could almost always tell when milk was from a plastic container, as it had an off taste. Of course, there was some concern over dioxin leaching into the milk from cardboard containers, but i am not aware that is still a problem, while some manufacturers are making the plastic container thicker of reduce the effect of fluorescent light

I’m certainly no kind of expert on powdered milk, but I do wonder where you found the brands you tested (I’ve never seen nor heard of any of them), and why you didn’t you test brands that are found everywhere. Now, I haven’t been everywhere, but what about Carnation, or Nestle, for example? What about Borden. It’s still around, isn’t it? Remember Elsie?

Warren, aside from the one store brand powdered milk I included in the testing, I was specifically looking for the powdered milks that are packaged for long term storage, which the Nestle, Carnation, etc. are not. Most of these are available online through the links within the article. Some were purchased at grocery stores in Utah. And yes, I remember Elsie, we just didn’t care to test her milk in this study. :)

Really enjoyed your taste test post and appreciate the effort you made to get this information to all of we curious folk. I think myself lucky to have serendipitously found your excellent web sight. kudos! rs

You should have had Thrive’s powdered milk in the taste-test. A friend of mine sells it and it is the ONLY powdered milk I or my kids will drink…they don’t even realize it’s powdered when I make it and we usually drink 2%!

I love the Thrive milk, unfortunately, this taste test was done before Thrive had their milk available, so it was not included. It is very good and I’d personally rank it among the best tasting powdered milks I’ve tried–especially with the new formula they introduced this year!

I loved this post, I am going to look into some of these. I do wonder though, did you see anything for those who are lactose intolerant? My two year old loves milk…..but cant drink it. Tried all the other kinds of milk and she wont drink it.

I haven’t tried any lactose free milks. I know there are shelf stable liquid milks like rice milk, soy milk, or almond milk, but they aren’t shelf stable for very long. Not sure if there is a powdered variety of any of those.

Why didn’t you review the powdered milks most often found in stores? Some of us can’t order these things online for one reason or another and it would have been much more helpful to a broader audience if you have included more common, national brands like Carnation, Nestle, Bob’s Red Mill or Organic Valley. I understand you are looking for things with a long shelf life, but that really shouldn’t be a deciding factor when one is looking for things to add to storage. It would best suit your followers to let them know they should be using what they store so they are accustomed to it and rotating things frequently in storage. When the situation arises to which we must live off of what we stored, I for one do not have to go though a period of adjustment to food on top of everything else. This wasn’t very helpful at all, and I guarantee I am not the only one who clicked on the link with high expectations, read this article and were subsequently very disappointed.

I just stumbled across this so its been awhile since the testing was done. In response to Kay…instead of complaining about what wasn’t done why not be grateful for what was. If you don’t like it then I encourage you to go to the time, trouble and expense and doing a taste test event for yourself.

I have stored and used Provident Pantry milk for several years, and my family likes it. This year I bought a can of Thrive milk from Shelf Reliance just to try. I have to say we like Thrive the best of all the brands we have tried. When it goes on sale I will be stocking up!

I love the Thrive milk as well and would for sure put it at the top of the milks I have tried, unfortunately this test was done before Thrive had their milk available so I wasn’t able to include it in the test.

I must be the only weirdo around that has always LOVED powdered milk. Growing up, I never really realized my family was poor. I remember we would occasionally have powdered instant milk instead of fresh. I was always a big fan! I loved fresh milk, too, but the powdered had a certain taste about it that I really liked. Years later, my dad told me, “You know, we used that stuff ’cause we didn’t have any money for anything else!” I’m guessing it was a store-brand. . . I just bought some “rainy day” instant milk to have on hand in case of emergency. I’ll have to try one of the higher rated ones next time and taste the difference!

We have always added dry vanilla pudding to our dry milk after we made it. It makes it richer and flavorful, you can also use dry jello mixes for other flavors. I do not recommend Chocolate because it is too weak, and stay away from citrus Yuck! Only orange is good. As is orange cream! I have not tried some of the new flavors of jello. We have not done this in a while so I am not remembering amounts. I do believe it was 1 of the jello for a quart of made milk. It varied for the flavor punch on weather we used 1 of the pudding for 1-2 of the quarts. 1 is best but with vanilla you can use 1 box for 2 quarts.

There are recipes out there to make evaporated milk and sweetened condensed milk with your dry milk mix. I use mine up this way so I always have fresh. Contrary to what the recipes might say you can make the sweetened condensed without a blender. Heat ingredients well before you add the dry milk and whisk for a prolonged period of time til milk powder is dissolved.

I just want to thank you very,very much for this fantastically helpful article. I buy powdered milk by the giant bucket to make knifer and yogurt and use for all milk needs. Have used Grandma’s and now using Emergency Essentials, which I think is delicious. Grandma’s is good too but more expensive. To Grandma’s credit,it is far easier to mix. Bought a ‘mixing pitcher’ from EE and now mixing dry milk is a joy! Good work, may you be happy and free from pain.

Excellent article. The only thing I would have like more is the cost per gallon instead of the cost per can in your tables. (but since you posted that in the content of the post it’s still there)

I’m sure the prices are much different by now, but I really appreciate you taking the time to research this. I never actually drink my powdered milk, but have kept it on hand for years to use when we run out of fresh and need it for cooking.

We had an emergency preparedness/provident living series of seminars at my church where there was a taste test done like this one. Included in the taste test were 2 different kinds available from the LDS storehouse. One was from the USA and one was from Canada. The USA one was terrible and the Canadian one ranked as one of the best tasting. Unfortunately, in Canada, skim milk powder costs an arm and a leg (about 4x the price) compared to the States because of all the milk regulations.